


Scars of Time

by FloralSkull



Series: God Knows You're Lonely Souls [1]
Category: Tales of Arcadia (Cartoons)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Eventually I will get better at tagging, F/M, First Meetings, Found Family, Scars, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:08:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26370031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FloralSkull/pseuds/FloralSkull
Summary: Douxie did not have a soulmate, not that he knew of anyway; and if he had had one at some point in his life, they were surely gone now.
Relationships: Archie & Hisirdoux "Douxie" Casperan, Hisirdoux "Douxie" Casperan/Original Character(s)
Series: God Knows You're Lonely Souls [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1946404
Comments: 10
Kudos: 31





	Scars of Time

**Author's Note:**

> Did I write a Soulmate AU one-shot with a different OC? All because I couldn’t stop thinking about the scar on Douxie’s hand? Yes, yes I did.

**Mid 1600s**

Douxie was no stranger to the idea of soulmates. How could he be when he was older than any human should be? Had walked among them for all this time and seen with his own eyes the power of it? The way it pulled people together, made them happy, changed their lives. Douxie did not have a soulmate, not that he knew of anyway; and if he had had one at some point in his life, they were surely gone now. 

“Do trolls have soulmates?” Andy asked Vendel one day when she was supposed to be paying attention to his lecture on transmutation. Vendel's talent for magic was the reason he had given for taking her under his care after she had been found years before. Someone had to teach her to control her magic. She might as well learn properly.

Against his better judgement, he had taken a liking to the young woman who had no memory of who she was before Kanjigar had found her in the forest. Much to his curiosity, she had not physically aged since that day. He suspected this had something to do with this foreign human practice. Soulmates. Two souls meant to find each other. Two bodies that bore the same mark. But he was also not convinced it had nothing to do with her magical abilities.

Trolls didn’t have the same kind of customs or rituals that humans did; that was the first thing Andy learned when she had begun living in Trollmarket. With Vendel as a teacher and no memory before she had been found, her interactions with humans were limited. She mostly learned about them through the passing conversations she heard when she’d sneak away from the market to the world above.

“And why are you curious about this instead of the mechanics of this transmutation?” Vendel asked in a sharp tone. She shrugged, it was the type of shrug that told Vendel that she was not paying the slightest bit of attention to his lesson. He sighed. He did not have it in him that day to wrangle her attention back to where it should be. “No, young one, trolls do not have soulmates. That is purely a _human_ practice.”

**Early 1800s**

Andy had a scar on her left hand. It started just below the line of her wrist, right in the middle, and curved tightly towards her thumb, stopping just before the joint. She often found herself running her fingers along it, tracing it’s ridges, memorizing its shape.

She had asked Kanjigar many times to tell her the story of when he had found her. Was there a battle? Did it look as if there had been a struggle? Had she been hurt? Was she the one who caused the scar?

“I have told you before, Andrea,” the Trollhunter said, making his way towards the forge to train, “your scar has always been a part of you.” 

She had learned to keep in step with her stone family. It had less to do with learning to walk faster, and more with learning to suspend herself in the air and move through it. It had taken a lot of practice and will power, but she had been determined. Mostly because her neck was starting to ache from looking so far up for the past hundred or so years.

“I can’t help asking.” She sighed. “I check the hand of every human I see, just in case, but - ” She stopped mid air and Kanjigar turned to see her distressed face. “What if they’re already gone?”

“Or, perhaps, not here yet?” He offered more gently.

“Don’t you want to find them?” Archie asked one night. 

He was curled up in Douxie’s lap and nudged at his left hand with his head. The hand that bore a long scar that curved from his wrist towards his thumb. Archie remembered well how he’d gotten it.

They were both comfortable on the roof of the boarding house they were staying at, nestled tightly between two rafters. The two of them had traveled all over the world and in those long years, Archie had noticed the young man stop looking. 

“No point, Arch. They’re probably long gone by now.” Douxie was good at pretending it didn’t bother him. But his familiar was far better at seeing right through the false bravado; the nonchalant air. “Besides, you know you’re my soulmate anyway.”

Archie stared up at Douxie’s face, which was also upturned staring at the stars above them. He wished that were true, and in some cosmic way it was. Archie and Douxie were bound together for the rest of their time on this plane and probably long after that as well. But it wasn’t the same, and Archie couldn’t help but ache for Douxie in the way his human refused to let himself.

**1930s**

“Douxie, where did you get that?” 

Douxie was almost fully dressed when Archie flew straight at him from where he had been curled up on the windowsill, all four paws making blunt contact with his chest. This sent him falling backwards onto his bed, so Archie, in his larger dragon form, was now sitting on his upper stomach, squinting down at his right collarbone.

“What was that for, Arch?”

Douxie roughly moved his familiar onto the bed next to him and angrily massaged his ribs. This didn’t stop Archie from crawling into his lap and poking his paw hard at Douxie’s collarbone again.

“This scar.” Archie said sternly. “Where did you get this scar?”

“I don’t have a scar there.” Douxie frowned, still irritated with Archie. He rose from the bed, causing Archie to jump down to the floor.

“Oh, yes you do!” He said, taking flight again and using his head to nudge Douxie into the small bathroom attached to his room.

“Okay, okay, easy!” Douxie huffed, stumbling into the small, tiled room and walked to get a look at his cracked mirror. Then he caught sight of it underneath the strap of his undershirt and practically threw himself at the sink to get as close to the mirror as possible. 

There it was. A long, thick strip of skin that was much paler than the surrounding color that lay under his extensive tattoo. It hadn’t even damaged the tattoo; no wonder he hadn’t noticed it. His hand rested on the mirror over the new mark before he looked down at his collarbone instead and rubbed at it as if by doing so hard enough it would come off.

Then he touched it lightly, felt the slight raise of it as it traveled from just near his throat to his shoulder. The rise was harsher in the middle and he assumed that, whatever had happened, the bone had broken the skin. He winced at the nonexistent pain.

“You know what this means, don’t you?” Archie beamed at him.

“Yeah,” Douxie said almost breathlessly. “Yeah, I know what this means.”

Andy had been stupid. She had no problem saying that in hindsight but only to Aaarrrgghh. She should never have rushed in to help the human children in the woods, not like that, and not so close to dusk. She should have been patient and come up with a plan, instead of head straight on into a flight with Bular. But she had seen the children and all common sense went out the window.

That was how she had ended up thrown against a tree with a broken collarbone and fractured wrist. With a fractured wrist she couldn’t do much magic. With a broken collarbone, she couldn’t do much of anything. Except, of course, sit and listen to a lengthy lecture from Vendel, then Kanjigar, then Blinky, then Vendel again for good measure.

Her wrist had healed faster. She had gotten halfway decent at healing spells. Her collarbone was in much worse shape. So she let Vendel work on fixing the protruding bone and torn skin. By the end of it, she had a long scar from just near her throat to her shoulder.

From then on she wore anything to cover both of her marks. She was done trying to find her soulmate. She was done a long time ago.

**Present**

Archie had gotten into his head. For centuries he had been able to go about his life without thinking of his scar; without looking for it on every hand that came into view. Then the one on his collarbone had appeared and he tried for the next few decades not to let his eyes fly to every collarbone he saw. 

But there was something about being in Arcadia. Something that put him on edge, like he was going to see someone sitting in his section at the cafe, or walk into the bookstore with both scars on display. There was too much happening here for it not to happen, right? No, he had to keep a level head about this.

“Jeeeez, Ands.” A gruff voice said from one of the tables near the counter, snapping him out of his thoughts. “That is one gnarly scar.”

Douxie couldn’t help but look up. The table was occupied by two of the mechanics from down the road who had stopped in for lunch. He’d seen them a handful of times before, especially Andy, though he only knew her name from the tag on her jumpsuit. She came in most mornings to pick up coffees for her and her coworkers. She tipped well and he couldn’t help but notice that she had a warm smile.

“What?” She looked almost panicked as she looked down at her jumpsuit, which was unzipped to the middle, showing off her dark tank top underneath. The right shoulder had slid a bit during their lunch to show a long scar on her collarbone. “Oh, yeah, uh, car accident.”

Douxie froze, wide eyed, and mouth dry. The guy across from her whistled and she quickly zipped her jumpsuit back up to hide the scar. 

“It must make it easy though, right? Finding your person?” The guy seemed to be completely oblivious to how uncomfortable this conversation was making her. She was practically squirming in her seat, looking like she was ready to bolt. “Mine?” He pulled up the leg of his jumpsuit to show a scar that was no bigger than his thumbnail. “Practically impossible.”

“Yup, that, uh, that sucks.” She said, getting up quickly. “Listen, I forgot that I need to change the tail light on Uhl’s truck before he comes to get it. You grab this one and I’ll cover the next one?”

“Yeah, yeah. You go. I got it.” 

Douxie tried to get a look at her left hand as she stood up. As she pushed a strand of her hair that had fallen from her ponytail behind her ear. But she had fingerless gloves on and was moving so fast that he doubted he’d have gotten a good look anyway.

When Vendel had gotten in contact with her, it had been at least two decades since she had been back in Trollmarket. But Kanjigar was dead and the amulet had selected a new Trollhunter; a _human_ Trollhunter. 

Andy was sure she had never traveled faster anywhere than back to Arcadia. By the time she found out the Trollhunter was a fifteen year old kid, she was ready to fight Merlin himself. She saw no other option than to stay, and help in any way she could.

However, balancing a job and helping train a teenage Trollhunter required quite a bit of caffeine. Caffeine that she liked to get from one particular cafe thanks to one particular server there. A particular server that she noticed eavesdropping on her conversation that day. Both he and the conversation had flustered her and she hadn’t realized that she had dropped her keys during her quick exit until she was trying to get into her apartment’s front door hours later.

She groaned, pressing her head against her front door before turning to run back down the stairs and a few blocks over to where she hoped he had already clocked out. With no such luck, she turned the corner and walked straight into him as he was writing on his order pad and walking back towards the cafe’s entrance.

“Sorry!” She said, grabbing his arm to steady herself as he reached out to make sure she didn’t fall.

“No trouble, Love.” Then he slid his left hand into his sweatshirt pocket and produced her keys. “I assume you’re looking for these?”

But Andy wasn’t looking at the keys he was holding out to her, draped over the back of his hand. She was looking at the hand itself. It was his left hand, and it had a scar, a scar that she couldn't take her eyes off of. She had given up such a long time ago.

“I, uh, got that one a very long time ago.” His voice sounded uncertain, like he was testing the waters. She didn’t miss the meaning.

“I’ll bet it feels like centuries.” She said, taking the keys from his hand. “Thanks.”

A smirk tugged at the corners of his mouth as she found she couldn’t make her feet move. She couldn’t have made another quick exit, even if she’d wanted to. She played with the keys between her fingers trying to figure out what to do. What did one do next? She had no idea.

“Are you free later?” He asked, bridging the silence. “I get off at seven and I’d really like to talk if you wanted to grab a bite?”

“Yeah, I’d really like that.” She said, then remembered she’d promised to train with Jim later that night. “Oh, actually, can we do tomorrow night? I forgot I have a…” she struggled to find the right word, “tutoring thing tonight.”

“Sure.” He said, walking backwards towards the cafe’s entrance. “We’ve got time.”

“Yeah,” She said more to herself as she watched the door close behind him. “I guess we do.”


End file.
